PODCAST NOTES

Guest:

Common misperceptions

Belief that we work something like a man made recording device.

In almost every critical way, we differ from any such device.” – Robert Bjork

How can it be that we have all these years of learning things and formal education and then end up really not understanding the process? You might just think by sheer trial and error during all of our educational experiences we would come to understand ourselves better than we apparently do.” – Robert Bjork

We found all these different situations where the very same thing that produces forgetting then enhances learning if the material is re-studied again. Forgetting is a friend of learning.” – Robert Bjork

The spacing effect

Delay in re-studying information

The environmental context

If you study it again, then you're better off to study it in a different place.

This is counter to the advice to study in a single place.

Retrieval practice

When you recall something, it does far more to reveal that you did indeed have it in your memory.

“Using our memories shapes our memory.”- Robert Bjork

As we use our memories, the things we recall become more recallable. Things in competition with the memories become less recallable.”- Robert Bjork

We should input less and output more.”- Robert Bjork

Test yourself; retrieval practice

Low-stakes or no-stakes testing is key to optimizing learning.”- Robert Bjork

“When I say they become inaccessible, they are absolutely not gone.”- Robert Bjork

Interleaving

“In all those real-world situation where there's several related tasks or components to be learned, the tendency is to provide instruction in a block test. It seems to make sense to work on one thing at a time.”- Robert Bjork

“We are finding that interleaving leads to much better long-term retention. It slows the gain in performance during the training process but, then leads to much better long-term performance.”- Robert Bjork

“Forgetting is not entirely a negative process. There are a number of senses in which forgetting can be a good thing.”- Robert Bjork

“The very same people who just performed better, substantially, with interleaving, almost uniformly said that blocking helped them learn better.”- Robert Bjork

Desirable difficulties

They're difficulties in the sense that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they're desirable in that they foster the very goals of instruction (long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations).

Interleaving vs blocking

Varying the conditions of learning and the examples you provide rather than keeping them constant

Spacing vs massing (cramming)

“The word desirable is key. There's a lot of ways to make things difficult that are bad.”- Robert Bjork

The generation effect

Any time you can take advantage of what your students already know and give them certain cues so that they produce an answer, rather than you giving them an answer, you greatly enhance their long-term retention.”- Robert Bjork

Incorporating generation is a desirable difficulty but people have to succeed at the generation. If they fail, it is no longer a desirable difficulty.”- Robert Bjork

Errors are a key component of effective learning.”- Robert Bjork

Successful forgetting

Memory relies on being in the same situation

Present it in a different context, produces longer-term learning

Encode the information differently; encoding variability

Retrieval is powerful, but depends on success to make it so

Many things are involved in remembering people's names.” – Robert Bjork

Self regulated learning

The key is for us all to learn how to learn more effectively.”- Robert Bjork

As a consequence of our complex and rapidly changing world and also changes in technology and educational environments, more and more learning is happening outside any formal classroom setting. It's in our own hands.”

Several books on research on learning

Closing notes

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Robert Bjork

Robert A. Bjork (PhD, Psychology, Stanford; BA, Mathematics, Minnesota) is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He has served as Editor of Memory & Cognition (1981-85) and Psychological Review (1995-2000), Co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (1998-2004), Chair of a National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance (1988-1994), and Chair of the UCLA Department of Psychology (2003-2010). He is a past president or chair of the American Psychological Society (APS); the Western Psychological Association; the Psychonomic Society; the Society of Experimental Psychologists; the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association (APA); and the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology. He is a recipient of UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award; the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Award; the American Physiological Society's Claude Bernard Distinguished Lectureship Award; the Society of Experimental Psychologists' Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award; and, together with Elizabeth Bjork, the James McKeen Cattell Award (“for outstanding contributions to applied psychological research”) from the Association for Psychological Science. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was selected to give the 120th Faculty Research Lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, during February 2016.

Bonni Stachowiak

Bonni is an Associate Professor of Business and Management at a small, private university in Southern California. She's been teaching in higher ed for over a decade, now, and constantly thinks about teaching while she's driving, brushing her teeth, and pretty much throughout most days.
Bonni started the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast in June of 2014 and has aired a podcast episode every week, since. She thrives on teaching and learning and is grateful for this community of people who are passionate about the same thing.

Comments

I thoroughly enjoyed this — thanks! I actually took notes of some of the key phrases that really resonated with me. After I finished listening, I then noticed the highlights on this page. My notes almost exactly matched the highlights! Great job all around.

Trackbacks

[…] Robert recently appeared on Bonni’s show and discussed some of their key findings over time that are relevant to learning and memory. Virtually every leader will benefit from some of the key lessons he brought to the episode, but two in particular resonated with me most: […]